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> right-wing anime

A little off-topic, but is right-wing anime really a thing?



Sure, kind of. Gate, for instance[0], an anime about the JSDF encountering a portal that opens to a medieval fantasy world, contains a lot of nationalistic and pro-military themes. Kantai Collection, an anime based on a game, features IJN ships as heros, and some historical revisionism[1]. I can't think of more off the top of my head. It doesn't seem to be a common theme but it's entirely possible I as a typical Western weeb just don't see it. A lot of anime set in the future portray Western powers in a negative light - the American Empire in Ghost in the Shell Stand Alone Complex is clearly villainous - but I don't know if that's "right wing" or just reasonable extrapolation.

It seems to be more common to discover the creators of an anime or manga holding right-wing or extreme beliefs, though, than for those to explicitly find their way into anime. The director of Recovery of an MMO Junkie, for instance[2] with his anti-semitic tweets.

[0]https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/Gate

[1]https://anitay.kinja.com/thoughts-from-outside-historical-re...

[2]https://kotaku.com/anime-director-causes-controversy-with-an...


There are a great number of Western anime fans who are also right-wing - either out of an admiration for Japan (which they perceive as being superior due to "racial harmony" and the position of women in that society) or out of the idea that Western media is infected by "SJWs", and Japanese media isn't.

I don't know how many right-wing anime fans there are in Japan (who would be the audience for right-wing anime), though going from the most popular anime, it's not a large enough group of people for the industry to cater to their tastes.


Nothing quite like being a Jewish kid going to middle school 15+ years ago and seeing classmates reading manga where the characters are basically dressed like Nazi Youth and they're 'protagonists' of the story.


To be fair, there is plenty of historically based anime and manga in which the Nazis, or vague stand-ins for the Nazis, are villains.

Still, Japan was an Axis power, and every vile thing the Nazis did, they did to foreigners half a world away, so Japanese media winds up being a lot more comfortable around Nazism as a motif than Westerners would be[0] because there's just not the same stigma around portraying it.

[0]https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/the-troubling-relationship-bet...




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